Introduction

Yanis Varoufakis is a vocal critic of capitalism. He is a Greek academic, writer, and politician – as former Minister of Finance, led negotiations during the government debt crisis of 2015. But even as the founder of the left-wing political party MeRA25 (European Realistic Disobedience Front) in 2018, he laments the bankruptcy of today’s left. He describes capitalism as a contradiction with immense advantages (innovation, wealth, gadgets, technologies) but also with an inherent tendency to cause aesthetic, moral, psychological, and financial poverty. Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean sit down with Varoufakis to understand his diagnosis of the ills of capitalism, not as an unjust system but one that is inefficient and freedom impeding.